Introduction
Rachel Reeves’ CV on LinkedIn may have been correct after all in claiming that she was an economist at Bank of Scotland and not head of paperclips at the Halifax. Who would not want to hush up being a senior figure at HBOS during the time it went under? But that is far from being the only new issue to be raised about her LinkedIn CV.
HBOS
This is the current entry about Reeves’ tenure at HBOS:
Is this version plausible? Would the Halifax hire an Oxford University graduate in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (a known springboard for a Parliamentary career) from a position as an economist at the Bank of England into a back office job? Is it not more likely that this Bank of England economist was hired into the main economics team advising the bank’s senior management during her tenure, which was 2006-2009?
The main movers in that management team were James Crosby and Andy Hornsby, and the bank pursued a high-growth strategy which culminated in a failure and a shotgun wedding with Lloyds Bank in the autumn of 2008, followed promptly by Lloyds requiring a £17 billion taxpayer bailout.
Are any of the research papers Reeves drafted for the bank available? If we could see them we would be in a position to judge the degree to which her work as an economist validated the bank’s strategic approach, the one that ended in an expensive train wreck.
Who would not want to paper over their role in that kind of disaster? What we need to know is what was the job role that Rachel Reeves applied for, who she interviewed with, who was in her line of reporting up to the chair and chief executive, what work she carried out, what her work outputs were and who they went to.
HBOS and the Great British Financial Crisis
HBOS was one of the financial institutions that showed high growth during the New Labour era, alongside weak risk management, and which arguably benefited from its remoteness from regulatory oversight thanks to the location of its head office, as well as its establishment in a Labour area: the North and Scotland preferred.
HBOS came crashing to earth along with Northern Rock (with its HQ in Blair’s constituency of Sedgefield), Bradford&Bingley, Alliance&Leicester and Royal Bank of Scotland, in the Great British Financial Crisis.
How Reeves described the period of the Great British Financial Crisis in her March 2024 Mais Lecture
Reeves, in her Mais Lecture of March 2024, made no mention of this aspect of New Labour’s thirteen years in power from May 1997. Instead she stated that ‘For a decade, the last Labour government offered stable politics alongside a stable economic environment’.
This would have been the decade from New Labour’s election in May 1997 until the shuttering of Northern Rock in August 2007.
Reeves’ claim of a decade of stability omitted to mention the three years of disaster that followed: from August 2007 until May 2010 while New Labour were still in power. Similarly her well-documented claim to have worked for a decade at the Bank of England omits that the last three of those years were spent at HBOS.
Reeves’ vision mirrors the ingredients for the Great British Financial Crisis
New Labour were thrilled to see this growth in financial services being shared around the UK. Now Reeves’ vision, to use phrases coined in her Mais Lecture, would ‘mobilise all of Britain’s resources’ and stand in contrast to ‘narrowly-shared growth’, these phrases being code for the rejection of growth concentrated in the South East of England, and specifically in the City of London.
Reeves’ Mansion House speech – delivered about financial services to a financial services audience – mentioned ‘growth’ 41 times, with economic growth being termed ‘our national mission’. In the same speech she criticised a financial regulatory ‘system which sought to eliminate risk-taking’.
So we have an apparent desire to reinstitute the high growth and risk-taking in financial services that led to the Great British Financial Crisis, and a policy of distributing this approach right across the UK, in institutions ‘from London to Edinburgh, and from Manchester to Belfast’ (Mansion House speech), as well as airbrushing out any mention of the previous crisis in this same sector under Labour’s previous stewardship of the nation’s economy (Mais Lecture).
Reeves’ Oxford qualifications as a ‘serious economist’
Mark Carney, former governor of Reeves’ alma mater the Bank of England, has described Reeves as a ‘serious economist’.
The first issue is whether a ‘serious economist’ takes a form of Joint Honours degree like Philosophy, Politics and Economics, or a Single Honours degree in Economics. The latter, surely.
Secondly we are entitled to know what class of degree Reeves obtained at Oxford. Graduates who obtained First Class Honours usually say so, and a First is what a ‘serious economist’ would normally have.
Thirdly there is the question of output. A genuine ‘serious economist’ – such as Dr Gerard Lyons[1] – has output in the form of books, peer-reviewed papers, and speeches. Where is Reeves’ output? All we have from her tenure at the Bank of England is a thank-you to ‘Rachel Reeves and Michael Sawicki for allowing me to draw on their work’ in a paper from 2005 by Martin Bell of the MPC called ‘Communicating Monetary Policy in Practice’.
Faux academic gravitas in the Mais Lecture
Reeves’ Mais Lecture quoted names of other supposed luminaries beyond number – Dani Rodrik, Huw Spencer, Rose Khattar, Anna Valero, Jon van Reenen, Melanie Brusseler, Matthew Lawrence, Graeme Cooke, David Edgerton and many, many more.
This panoply was obscure enough that listeners to the lecture would not know whether Reeves had quoted them correctly, assuming that listeners had even heard of them. This technique both lent a false gravitas to the lecture, and begged the question of whether Reeves’ reliance on the views of others was a device to cloak a dearth of ideas of her own.
‘Master’s degree’ at the LSE
Another element in Reeves’ claim to be a ‘serious economist’ is her ‘Master’s degree’ (the term in her LinkedIn CV) obtained from the London School of Economics over one academic year – Sep 2003 to June 2004 – while she was employed at the Bank of England and during part of which period she claims to have been at the British Embassy in Washington DC as Second Secretary Economic division:
We need to know a lot more about this ‘Master’s degree’. What subject was studied? Who was her supervisor? Was a degree obtained? What degree? With what class? Was a dissertation produced, and if so, on what subject and is it in the public domain? One academic year seems short for a Master’s degree obtained whilst one is in full-time employment and, for some of the time, abroad:
My own Open University History MA was done by distance learning in two parts: firstly lasting 67 weeks from October 2019, and secondly a dissertation completed in December 2021 (which is in the public domain). The total elapsed time was 27 months, and the result a Distinction. Let’s have the proof that Rachel Reeves really does have a Master’s degree, in a relevant subject, and with a result on a level with what one would expect from a ‘serious economist’.
Conclusion
There are many questions about Reeves’ claim to be sufficiently qualified to manage the nation’s finances, and they are not limited to her time at HBOS. Greater detail is certainly needed about that role, but also about her two degrees and about her research output. On the back of that she may have to amend her CV again, or, given the number of issues, re-write it completely.